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Liz Phair's response to NY Times Bad review

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Liz Phair's response to NY Times Bad review

Old 06-29-03, 06:08 PM
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Liz Phair's response to NY Times Bad review

Wonder if Liz is going to write one of these for the dozens of other bad reviews. She can start with the 1 star review she got in the LA Times today.


LIZ PHAIR
Chicken Little's Tale
To the Editor:

Re "Liz Phair's Exile in Avril-ville" by Meghan O'Rourke [June 22]:

Once upon a time there was a writer named Chicken Little. Chicken
Little worked very hard and took her job very seriously. Often, she
even wrote. One day, just as Chicken Little was about to have an idea,
she heard something falling on her roof. "The sky is falling! The sky
is falling!" she shrieked, spilling green tea and vodka all over her
work station. This commotion awoke her three readers, who lived with
her in her hut, and all three rushed outside to see what had happened
to the sky. After enduring several anxious minutes alone, Chicken
Little was relieved to see her readers return. "Oh, Chicken Little, it
was just the trees dropping their buds on a beautiful spring day,"
they said. Chicken Little tried not to show her disappointment.

Not long after, as Chicken Little was poring over some back issues of
other writers' material, she felt another idea about to form in her
mind. "Truth . . . no . . . Lies . . . no . . . ummm . . . ummm . . .
Conspiracy!" She was just about to write this down, when a great
clattering and scraping began above her head. Clutching her PC to her
breast, she swung her head wildly to and fro. "The sky is falling!
This time, the sky is falling! The sky is falling!" She meant to alert
her readers. She felt very responsible for them. They played outdoors,
mostly, and had very open minds. The three readers rushed back into
the hut, very concerned, and when they saw the look of dread on
Chicken Little's sweet face and her finger pointing skyward,
trembling, they immediately turned around and rushed back out to see
what was the matter. For a few breathless moments, they could neither
confirm nor deny, then they all saw the same thing at once. "Chicken
Little," said the readers, "it's only two squirrels chasing each other
in amorous conquest, skittering over the eave of our house." "It's
quite funny, actually," added one of the readers, "you should come and
see." But Chicken Little was annoyed. "I have work to do!" she fumed.
"Besides, I wasn't speaking to you. I was performing a haiku," she
fibbed, faxing something.

Well, time passed, and the readers grew, and so did Chicken Little,
but not very much. The light inside the hut was dim, and she worked in
a huddled position for long hours. She grew paranoid. She began to
think she wasn't sure anymore. She began to fear she didn't know.
Then, just as her resolve was nearly wiped away clean, she heard a
sound that was not very loud. She cocked her head from side to side,
her little neck pouch jiggling, and pecked at a few pebbles lying
around her desk. Yes, the sound was definitely there. In fact, it was
coming from all sides now, the sound of a million tiny things dropping
on her roof. She peeked out her window and saw a million tiny things
dropping from the sky. All her chicken senses gathered in supreme
vindication. She opened her throat as wide as it would go and crowed,
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling! By God, any moron can see the
sky is falling!"

The peacefully sleeping readers were aroused, but did not pay
attention anymore, so used to her hysteria were they by now that her
crowing became one more familiar noise in the chattering nighttime
forest.

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Chicken Little screeched,
terrified they would not heed her and would be found the next morning,
buried among the intellectual debris. She pecked and pecked at them
with her sharp little beak until they finally agreed to be awakened.
The three readers rose up and shuffled outside to be greeted by a
warm, summer rain falling steady as a heartbeat, wondrous and quiet as
unexpected relief from pain. "Why, Chicken Little," said one reader,
"it's only a summer shower come to feed the land. It feels great!"
Chicken Little cowered in the corner as a fork of lightning licked the
trees. "It's dangerous!" she cried, "you could slip on the wetness!
You could catch a nasty cold! You could get electrocuted!" The three
readers laughed, and went back out to experience the mystery of the
storm, without thinking, without deconstructing, without checking what
the other would do first. "Listen to me! Listen to me!" cried Chicken
Little, as she watched their backs turn. The three readers stopped at
the door and called out before leaving: "C'mon, Chicken Little. Hurry
up, you're gonna miss it!"
LIZ PHAIR
Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Old 06-29-03, 06:32 PM
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I'm really sick of these people who think they are entitled to get good reviews. You know something Liz, not everyone is going to like your music!! Get over yourself!! I bought Liz Phair's first album, and I thought it was complete crap!

For someone who would most likely be waiting tables she needs to show a little more humility and gratitude toward the people who actually DO like her music.
Old 06-29-03, 07:39 PM
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Considering that she hasn't put out a decent album in ten years, you'd think she'd be used to bad reviews by now.
Old 06-29-03, 07:48 PM
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If she was going to piss and moan about a bad review, she could have at least made it interesting or funny.
Old 06-29-03, 08:11 PM
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What a tw(a)(i)t (pick a letter).

You made poor musical choices and the critics aren't happy. Go back to the damn drawing board or retire, woman. We have enough flaky songbirds on our plate right now, we don't need one more.
Old 06-29-03, 09:06 PM
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Could someone translate that "tale" for me..

Listening to her new album has lowered my intelligence..
Old 06-29-03, 09:47 PM
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I read that whole thing waiting for a punchline. I am very disappointed.
Old 06-29-03, 10:04 PM
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It never seems like a good idea for an artist to write a response to a poor review. No matter what they say, it always appears desperate.
Old 06-29-03, 10:18 PM
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like cungar & Captain Harlock pointed out..not everyone is going to like her album...

nor do I see why it should matter to her..

perhaps, if the review had nothing to do with the music and was all about her life choices/personal stuff, THEN I might be able to understand the need to respond..

but to get bent just because the critic didn't like the disc..?

get a hobby dear. you can't please all of the people all of the time..
Old 06-30-03, 02:47 AM
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She's an idiot. That article was boring. Her album sucks. The three people who still listen to her music are probably disapponted in her now more than ever.
Old 06-30-03, 04:14 AM
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It doesn't matter what she does now or in the future because music is timeless.

there will always be "Exile in Guyville"

a truly great record.

nobody can take that away from her.
Old 06-30-03, 08:12 AM
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Originally posted by Frank TJ Mackey
It doesn't matter what she does now or in the future because music is timeless.

there will always be "Exile in Guyville"

a truly great record.

nobody can take that away from her.
Ehh...

Exile on Main St. is better. I am seriously underwhelmed by Liz's output. Everytime a woman (Kim Deal, Natalie Merchant, etc...) releases an "indie" album, it is lauded as the second coming. When usually the album turns out decent at best.
Old 06-30-03, 08:14 AM
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Originally posted by Rogue588


Could someone translate that "tale" for me..

Listening to her new album has lowered my intelligence..
Basically I think she is saying that author (chicken little) is mistaken and the sky is not actually falling and that something good is actually happening (Phair's new musical style), even though the author is trying to tell the public they should be afraid of this new thing, they instead embrace it ( ). Oh yeah, and she is calling the writer fat.

Looks like someone to Allegory 101 at the Learning Annex, huh Liz?
Old 06-30-03, 09:33 AM
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Originally posted by Trigger
She's an idiot. That article was boring. Her album sucks. The three people who still listen to her music are probably disapponted in her now more than ever.
Don't know what your beef with Liz is Trigger, but it's getting old. She's got way more than three fans. And you'd have to be an idiot to think otherwise. You don't like the album? That's your choice. I happen to like her and everything she's done. Do I think she's the second coming? Hell no. But she's not as bad as you keep making her out to be. And good for her for having the guts to write to that critic. At least she's not another celebrity telling the government how to run the country. She's just defending a project she worked on for nearly five years. What's wrong with that?
Old 06-30-03, 09:43 AM
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Originally posted by Daytripper
She's got way more than three fans.
Yeah, she has Daytripper, dolphinboy, jdpatri plus evenflowddt. (Info taken from another thread). That's 4! Trigger, get your facts right because you post!
Old 06-30-03, 09:47 AM
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Originally posted by evenflowddt
Yeah, she has Daytripper, dolphinboy, jdpatri plus evenflowddt. (Info taken from another thread). That's 4! Trigger, get your facts right because you post!
For the record, I know he was being sarcastic about the number. Just like his comment in the other thread about not knowing anything about music. Was just trying to point out it was a pretty stupid thing to say either way.
Old 06-30-03, 02:51 PM
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Has anyone read the original review? I feel like I would need to see it before passing judgment on her response...
Old 06-30-03, 02:53 PM
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@ Trigger:

You're wrong. I just did a quick survey of three people I know that listen to Phair, and they unanimously say that they like the new album and that none of them are disappointed. So that makes four of us (incl myself).

Now, do I have to point out how utterly moronic it is to assume that only three people listen to an artist of her standing. Studio time, mastering, pressing, artwork etc. costs alot of money, and no record label would ever go through all that to sell three CDs. I thought that was a given, but some people obviously don't know ****.

P
Old 06-30-03, 03:23 PM
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Originally posted by LurkerDan
Has anyone read the original review? I feel like I would need to see it before passing judgment on her response...
Ah ha! I see where Liz got her Chicken Little analogy from! O'Rourke is a senior editor for a site called Slate. I couldn't find the review in question on there, but this one was on there.

edit:
I found some paragraphs [at the NY Times and some other places]: [but you have to pay for the rest...]

"IN 1993, the year Liz Phair's ''Exile in Guyville'' came out, legions of young, middle-class, well-educated women found in her lo-fi debut a kind of all-purpose autobiography, and a template -- smart, deadpan, but also earnest -- for making sense of their own experience. Within a year Ms. Phair went from being a 26-year-old singer-songwriter who had performed live some half-dozen times to the woman on the cover of Rolling Stone with the headline ''Liz Phair: A Rock and Roll Star Is Born.'' The obvious question was: Would Ms. Phair be able to sustain her success?

Ten years later, having put out two albums, ''Whip-Smart'' (1994) and ''whitechocolatespaceegg'' (1998), that were both greeted with mixed praise, she is now releasing her fourth -- the eponymously titled and much anticipated ''Liz Phair.'' It is, Ms. Phair has suggested, her bid for center stage -- the moment when she will finally make the leap from indie-rock quasi-stardom to teen-pop levels of superstardom. "

“The album introduces a new Phair: a divorced, 36-year-old single mom who nonetheless gushes like a teenager through relentlessly upbeat songs with bland choruses like "Rock me all night!" and "I am extraordinary/ If you'd ever get to know me" — ironic, yes, but somewhat limply and shallowly so. You half expect the "i's" in her liner notes to be dotted with little hearts. In place of a sometime feminist icon, we have a woman approaching 40 getting dolled up in market-approved teen gear (the bad schoolgirl look, recently embraced by Britney Spears).”

“In doing advance publicity for the album, Ms. Phair has repeatedly said she wanted to explore new musical avenues, and noted that she wouldn't know how to write Guyville today even if she wanted to. But no one expects her to. The newly divorced Ms. Phair could have written a record that captured the experience of women like her, women who may not have a husband to bring home a second check, but still want an active sexual life and maybe a child, and also want the means to raise that child,” continues O’Rourke.

“Music, after all, is a cultural arena that's somewhat safe for older women. Patti Smith, Lucinda Williams, Kim Gordon and Chrissie Hynde — all of whom have something in common, in terms of personality and audience, with Ms. Phair — are doing fine. So it's not exactly clear where the desire to infantilize herself comes from, unless it's that Ms. Phair, perennially willful, wants to buck expectations and write home about it.”
Old 06-30-03, 03:26 PM
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wait.

found it...
Liz Phair's exile in Avril-ville

By Meghan O'Rourke

In 1993, the year Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" came out, legions of
young, middle-class, well-educated women found in her lo-fi debut a kind of
all-purpose autobiography, and a template - smart, deadpan, but also
earnest - for making sense of their own experience. Within a year Ms. Phair
went from being a 26-year-old singer-songwriter who had performed live some
half-dozen times to the woman on the cover of Rolling Stone with the
headline "Liz Phair: A Rock and Roll Star Is Born." The obvious question
was: Would Ms. Phair be able to sustain her success?
Ten years later, having put out two albums, "Whip-Smart" (1994) and
"whitechocolatespaceegg" (1998), that were both greeted with mixed praise,
she is now releasing her fourth - the eponymously titled and much
anticipated "Liz Phair." It is, Ms. Phair has suggested, her bid for center
stage - the moment when she will finally make the leap from indie-rock
quasi-stardom to teen-pop levels of superstardom.

Instead, she has committed an embarrassing form of career suicide.

The album introduces a new Phair: a divorced, 36-year-old single mom who
nonetheless gushes like a teenager through relentlessly upbeat songs with
bland choruses like "Rock me all night!" and "I am extraordinary/ If you'd
ever get to know me" - ironic, yes, but somewhat limply and shallowly so.
You half expect the "i's" in her liner notes to be dotted with little
hearts. In place of a sometime feminist icon, we have a woman approaching 40
getting dolled up in market-approved teen gear (the bad schoolgirl look,
recently embraced by Britney Spears). She's junked her oddball, sui generis
eccentricity for songs about thirtysomething traumas wrapped up in
bubble-gum pop that plays off a cheap dissonance: underneath this sunny
soundscape lies the darkness of life's hard-won lessons. This is a
superficial way of jolting us, and the result is that Ms. Phair often sounds
desperate or clueless; the album has some of the same weird self-oblivion of
a middle-aged man in a mid-life crisis and a new Corvette.

Not only will Ms. Phair alienate her old fan base, as she has defensively
acknowledged in recent interviews, but in trying to remodel herself as a
contemporary Avril Lavigne or Alanis Morissette, she's revealed herself to
be astonishingly tone-deaf to her own strengths. Lyrically, this album has
little of the potent acuity of her early deconstructions of relationships,
and musically it has none of her tactile immediacy. "Exile in Guyville," a
song-for-song answer to the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street," seemed
shockingly new not only because Ms. Phair, in her cracked, monotonous voice,
sang about sex so diffidently and explicitly but because Guyville was such a
recognizable, ordinary place - a collective village of young Americans whose
defining idiom was ironic detachment. Ms. Phair's particular gift lay in her
sharp-tongued charting of everyday emotions. Nearly all the songs were about
romantic yearning, getting together, breaking up; the album was like a
sophisticated self-help manual, whether you heard her songs as cautionary
tales or as encouragement to take more risks. She wittily nailed the sulky
disagreements of relationships, how quickly the trivial could provoke a sour
truth: "And it's true that I stole your lighter/ And it's also true that I
lost the map/ But when you said that I wasn't worth talking to/ I had to
take your word on that."

Her voice always held a back-story of suppressed emotions, the kind it's
hard to get into a pop song; when she said "That's just fine with me" in
response to a sexual proposition, you heard everything that wasn't fine, and
also all the reasons she didn't want to get into it. She repeatedly leveled
her straight-talking sensibility at men who said "things I wouldn't say/
straight to my face, boy" while expecting her to be a kind of sexy, game
compadre. On a good day, Guyville was a place where women feistily, happily
flaunted their sexuality. On a bad day Guyville was a place where one woke
up with a man and "almost immediately . . . felt sorry."

But where P.J. Harvey's wailing or Courtney Love's anger were shamanistic
and almost feral, Ms. Phair was reassuringly human in her appetites, her
arrogance, her fear, her inability to quite hit that high note. Her sexual
frankness went hand in hand with a recorded-in-the-garage immediacy. The
songs were spindly and moved in an odd, lopsided manner - parts were always
coming loose, and who knew if Ms. Phair was going to hit the next note as
she crashed her way through the chord progressions. Her signature style of
drawing a word out across several notes in a kind of dull trill made a
mockery of all that was feminine about singing. It seemed aptly to capture a
generation's uncertainty about what might come next in the sexual game
during a permissive era shadowed by anxieties about AIDS and date rape,
culminating in Antioch College's prescriptive sexual code.

Living up to her debut would have been nearly impossible, and the critical
consensus was that "Whip-Smart" and "whitechocolatespaceegg" didn't. While
"Whip-Smart" didn't have the same singularity of theme as "Guyville," it
embroidered on Ms. Phair's interest in American mythologies in songs like
"Shane" and "Go West." "Whitechocolatespaceegg" was more explicitly driven
by songs about characters (several narrated by men) and eccentric wit
(there's a very funny song about a family portrait of her Uncle Alvarez).
Neither album was a breakout success.

And so Ms. Phair has decided to reinvent herself. For the new CD, which took
her five years to put together, she had come up with an album's worth of
songs (a handful produced by Michael Penn, which explains why she sometimes
sounds like his wife, the singer Aimee Mann), but still felt something was
"missing," as she told Entertainment Weekly. So she teamed up with the
Matrix - the songwriter/producer masterminds behind the teenybopper Avril
Lavigne's recent top-40 hits "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi" - in search of a
radio hit. The Matrix are now writing songs for everyone from Britney to
Ricky Martin, and they're not exactly in the business of making a singer
sound more like herself.

Yet Ms. Phair's appeal has always lain in her idiosyncrasies. When it comes
to rock, we're used to wincing at stars dressed up in packaging that masks a
lack of talent. Here, the wince comes instead from watching a genuine talent
dressed in bland packaging. The album lacks the distinctive flair and sass
of Ms. Phair's earlier work, and has little of its savvy insight. The songs
are catchy, replete with pop hooks, but they're relentlessly peppy, and
often Ms. Phair sounds as over-carbonated as a 13-year-old full of Diet Coke
and Pop Rocks. The slick production diminishes her boldness the same way
those child-size T-shirts emblazoned with the word "Sexy" always seem to
make a mockery of their wearers. Her fantastically expressive diffidence has
been replaced with a smooth and characterless tunefulness, pitch-corrected
all the way through.

In the world of "Liz Phair," banality wins the day, and intimacy is
undermined by full-throttle presentation; the pleasingly goofy, outsize
metaphors from "Guyville" and "Whip-Smart" about eyelashes that "sparkle
like gilded grass" have devolved into hoary allegories in which
relationships are compared to roadside accidents; life is a series of red
and green traffic lights, and a woman is "like a wild flame." Throughout,
the singer studs her verses with soft clichis like "too scared to commit"
and "it's a war with the whole wide world" and moments of "lying awake in
the dark/ trying to figure out who you are."

Ms. Phair is still, at times, fearlessly and bizarrely outspoken - consider
"H.W.C.," an ode to the beauty benefits of semen. In the first song,
"Extraordinary," she offers a characteristic skewering of the contemporary
male's fetishization of psychotic women - "So I still take the trash out/
does that make me too normal for you?" But the album's sporadic ironies
("I'm your average everyday sane-psycho supergoddess") are robbed of context
and lost in all the sugar-coated guitar joie de vivre. The overall effect is
of spending an afternoon with a once sardonic best friend overdosing on mood
enhancers. You wait for the wink to come - the flaw, the crack in her voice,
the weird minor note - that signals that Ms. Phair knows what she's up to
(and that she knows we know too). But it never does.

IN doing advance publicity for the album, Ms. Phair has repeatedly said she
wanted to explore new musical avenues, and noted that she wouldn't know how
to write "Guyville" today even if she wanted to. But no one expects her to.
The newly divorced Ms. Phair could have written a record that captured the
experience of women like her, women who may not have a husband to bring home
a second check, but still want an active sexual life and maybe a child, and
also want the means to raise that child. Music, after all, is a cultural
arena that's somewhat safe for older women. Patti Smith, Lucinda Williams,
Kim Gordon and Chrissie Hynde - all of whom have something in common, in
terms of personality and audience, with Ms. Phair - are doing fine. So it's
not exactly clear where the desire to infantilize herself comes from, unless
it's that Ms. Phair, perennially willful, wants to buck expectations and
write home about it.

On only two songs on the album does Ms. Phair's impastoed, cheery smile
crack, and both get under your skin. "Little Digger" tries to explain to her
6-year-old son why his father is gone and she's dating other men, and
"Friend of Mine" tells of an old lover drifting out of reach. It captures
something you may have heard your own single friends say - namely, that at a
certain point they just don't want to keep getting seriously involved ("I
don't have the heart to try/ one more false start in life") because the
adult toll of losing not only a lover but also a friend - the person you
talk to every day - is too formidably high. Like so many of Ms. Phair's
early songs, "Friend of Mine" begins in medias res, with a wistful but wry
plan for recovery: "Gonna take a vacation/ stop chasing what I lack." Of
course, plans for recovery are quickly undermined by woe: "It's been so
long/ since you've been a friend of mine," she sings, before saying "I miss
you" - and for the first time on the record you hear an emotion more
complicated than stage-lit optimism or empty irony. It makes you want to
play the song again.
Old 06-30-03, 04:11 PM
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as always...

pics?
Old 06-30-03, 09:11 PM
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Chalk me up as another who has been a Liz fan since Guyville AND who like the new CD.

I can understand some of the criticism leveled at her, but a lot of the reviews I've read seem to be more angry about the fact that she's not making the same record as Guyville. It's a catch 22 I guess, make the same music that got you famous you get called old and formulaic, change and you become a sellout.

The best bad review i've read was from someone who apparantly didn't read the liner notes since they proclaimed that Liz didn't write a single song on the new CD. By my count she has single writing credits on 9 songs and shares credit on the other five, and if you count the music on the downloadable EP (which is pretty damn good BTW) thats 5 more she wrote.

Seems everyone is so wound up about her change of direction that they seem to be ignoring the music and talking up how different she looks, how she sold out.

Last edited by SmackDaddy; 06-30-03 at 09:16 PM.
Old 06-30-03, 09:17 PM
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If it means anything...

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record...iz-phair.shtml

I don't know if they've ever given a record that rating before.

Old 07-01-03, 03:53 AM
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What I really want to know is if "Ms. Phair" actually wrote the Chicken Little story herself, or if she got help from THE MATRIX?
Old 07-01-03, 07:00 AM
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I think the critics are out of control. This album is hardly the "Heaven's Gate" they are making it out to be. It's not even the worst album released last week let alone this year. Granted, when I first heard it, I didn't like a handful of songs. In fact, I borderline hated them. But as I listened to the album over time, they began to grow on me. My first impression over all was, it sounded like Liz past, present and future. Because there are a few songs on there that could have easily been lifted from her first two albums. A few sound like something off "WCSE". And the rest were pure pop. I don't think it's wise for Liz to work with people like the Matrix again. But if she does, she should keep it to a minimum. I'll take a double album full of Matrix produced Liz Phair songs over the likes of Matchboxtwenty anyday.

Last edited by Daytripper; 07-01-03 at 07:03 AM.

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